I am staying in an old monastery just below the hill town of Fiesole, a longish walk up the hill from Florence, Italy. Luxurious by the standards of those who long lived here, my small room has a single bed with comfortable mattress, an armoire, hot water, and the other basic accoutrements of modern life.  But there are no frills other than a small TV, which I ignore.  It is a short walk from the monastery up a little higher to the European University Institute.  The Political Science part is housed in an even older building whose earliest parts were probably built in the 11th century.  Surrounded by working olive groves on three sides, the whole place is  a kind of Shangra La for the top social science graduate students in Europe.  They work very hard, but what a wonderful place to do the work.

Interestingly, the EUI is mostly modeled on American models of higher education.  According to those I have talked with here, most European universities are ntelletually in grown, you go to school and maybe eventually teach, at the same place all your life.  There is no market for good faculty.  Rather, most are academic fiefdoms rooted more in connections than quality of work.  With all its undoubted problems, the American model was what people starting from scratch have tried here. 

The one difference, and it is an important one, is that there is no tenure here.  EUI picks the top people in the areas of interest to them, and offers them 5 year contracts, able to be extended once, and that’s it.  I think in many ways that is preferable to tenure, where academic dead wood takes up space needed for creative work.

I am amazed by the age of so much here.  Even the house of the colleague who invited me to the EUI was built well before Columbus.   As I walked up a short cut to the house, part of the way was on an Etruscan road that predated the Romans.  The stones paving the road were of Etruscan or Roman origin.  I imagined that I was walking in the footsteps of relatively recent Legionaires all the way back to those who first built a hill town in this part of Italy. 

One rather surprising result is that some of the trees here are very big. They were planted centuries ago, and have never been cut.  The original forests are long gone, but favored  trees are of old growth venerability 

Traffic is completely unlike what I am used to in America.  People ignore lanes, even when defined by painted lines.  Cars are far smaller than in America, and there are hundreds, thousands, of small motor scooters.  Unlike in California, where I live, pedestrians can never count on a car stopping for them, even in a cross walk.  This happened to me today. The slow and insolent show-offs I have seen in Berkeley, oozing across a street even when the light has turned red against them, would quickly have their genes removed from the gene pool were they in Italy.

From this hill I am staying on, I can look down on Florence, laid out along the valley below. Its Renaissance churches and towers still dominate its skyline.  Even today Florence is a fairly small city, about 500,000.  It was vastly smaller 600 years ago when it illuminated the rise of the Western intellect.   The old part of the city takes only about 20 minutes to walk across, if you ignore the museums, architecture, statues and other charms along the way. And why do that?  Over an over I would turn a corner and see statues and buildings I had only seen in art books, creations vastly more impressive when actually encountering them.

Small as it was, along with Athens, Florence is one of the two most important cities in the rise of the modern west.  The only competitor would be Rome, which connected Pagan and Christian  times.  It was here in Florence that the Renaissance reached its zenith, with the works of Michelangelo, DaVinci, and so many other artists of that time.  Here Galileo laid the foundations for so much of modern science.  Here Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for holding opinions not much different from mine. here is where Machiavelli instituted a revival in the study of politics. 

Ancient as it is, Florence and its history brings much to mind that we deal with today.

A man who said “I love my city more than my soul,” Machiavelli has been misread by many, especially NeoConservatives, as being obsessed with a ruthless and win at all costs approach to politics.  They look in a mirror and call it Machiavelli, but it is their own grotesque image they see staring back.  In reality he was a Florentine patriot seeking somehow to save the city he loved from the depredations of the barbarians to the north.  Those he called barbarians were the French and Austrians.

By contrast, the NeoConservatives are today’s barbarians. The Bill Kristols, Harvey Mansfields, Michael Ledeens and other NeoCon ilk dreaming of eternal glory in being remembered for blood soaked deeds where the other side is destroyed are precisely the sorts Machiavelli deplored.

And here is where the best surviving works of Pagan Rome and Greece helped jump-start European civilization after it had withered with the decline of Rome.  Unlike the Bush crime family, for all its corruption the Medicis bequeathed to the world the learning of the ancients, the art and architecture of the Renaissance, and a renewed confidence that the generation of their time was at least equal to the best of those who had gone before.

The timing was good when Florence became the center point of the Renaissance. It was during the Renaissance that Islamic civilization began to be smothered with the bigotry of its own literalists, just as Christian literalists threaten to do here today in the US.  The heritage of Rome and Greece could have been lost for good. 

Interestingly, a less corrupt city might not have been able to concentrate the wealth that gave birth to modernity by employing so many translators, artists, and engineers. Florence (and we ourselves) were also fortunate also that  a Talibanesque reaction, that of Savanarola, did not last.  While he briefly ruled many works of art were destroyed (the roiginal ‘bonfire of the vanities’) and theological virtue was supposed to rule over everything.  Happily, he did not rule long, and ultimately added his fat to the flames that would later incinerate Bruno.

There is a bittersweet flavor to all this history and art.  Had the avariciousness of a corrupt Papacy not squeezed the rest of Europe so tightly to pay for all this splendor, we might never have had a Reformation and the wars of religion that followed.  The Protestant challenge from the North caused the Catholic Church to become much less tolerant of doctrinal differences, and the relative freedom of thought that bred the Renaissance was squelched by the Counter Reformation and the closing of the European mind that followed.  See Stephen Toulmin’s wonderful Cosmopolis for more on this important issue. 

Later, when the Enlightenment finally gave peace to the blood soaked lands now split into Catholic and Protestant,  a narrower view of the mind and reason took over from that of the Renaissance.  Reason was to rule alone, mythos was lost, and our path towards pure secularism was launched.